


An Imperfect World

by Yeah_JSmith



Series: Post-Canon Sibling Bonding [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: An Alt-Right Troll Gets What's Coming to Him, Childhood Trauma, Dipper and Mabel vs the System, Fist Fights, Gen, Mabel Pines Is Awesome, Magic, Nightmares, Pansexual Mabel Pines, Political Commentary, Protective Siblings, Sibling Bonding, Stereotypes are Gross, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23525386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeah_JSmith/pseuds/Yeah_JSmith
Summary: Mabel doesn't like the world she lives in. It's harsh and cold and mean and angry and everything she tries so hard not to be. Years later, she still can't stop thinking about Mabeland, but she can'ttalkabout it, until Dipper points out the way reality seems to bend to her whims.It's a difficult conversation, but one they needed to have a long time ago.
Relationships: Dipper Pines & Mabel Pines
Series: Post-Canon Sibling Bonding [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1802347
Comments: 10
Kudos: 78





	An Imperfect World

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, Jael here with a bit of commentary on canon and real-life. I'm pretty sure everybody knows the many problems that GF had (racial stereotyping, casual misogyny, queerness as a joke, among other things), and I doubt the writer(s) meant for that to be the case, but it is. As I re-watched the series recently, it bothered me, probably because I was actually sober this time. Mabel is a character who would hate that. At 12, she probably wouldn't understand it, but 16-year-old Mabel vents her dissatisfaction. ALSO: I have a sort of casual mention of "passing privilege" here, which I don't tend to buy into on the whole, but as someone who has experienced the phenomenon of being read as something other than what I am and therefore not being hassled for what I _actually_ am, I can definitely see where it comes from and why the term exists. I acknowledge the level of safety it affords me, even if it's problematic in other, more insidious ways.
> 
> Sorry if I don't do well on the characterization. I don't remember what it's like to be 17, I never went to high school, and I don't have siblings, so all I can do is age up the canon characters and hope I've adapted them to be age-appropriate.

Most people didn’t like Mabel except for in small doses. On the whole, she was okay with that — she’d dealt with it her entire life, being likeable and cute until she wasn’t anymore, being bullied by people who were not okay with whatever made her different. In elementary school it had been classmates who didn’t like her aggressive cheer and colorful enthusiasm, or on more than one occasion, classmates who had bullied Dipper and gotten the sharp end of her tongue in response. In middle and high school it had evolved; first kids who thought she and Dipper were weird for their “creepy” interests and inside jokes, then queerphobes and anti-intellectuals and baby alt-right dumpster fires, and Mabel tried to take it on the chin.

Honestly, she did. It was just that sometimes, the bullies needed to take something on the chin, too, and that “something” usually ended up being Mabel’s fist.

“...And so you see,” she finished with a broad, self-deprecating smile, hands splayed open with palms facing upward, “I defended myself. I honestly didn’t mean to hurt him that much, Dr. Wood. Looking back, maybe he wasn’t _really_ threatening me, and I might have just _imagined_ the knife, but I’m a girl, and you hear all those _stories_ about boys getting mean when girls aren’t so nice, and when he grabbed my arm I just...reacted. Maybe he only wanted to beat up Dipper instead. Would that have been more appropriate, do you think? To step back and see if he just wanted to rough up my twin brother?”

The Principal frowned, looking at Mabel and Dipper. She knew what he was seeing: a scared-but-defiant little girl with a bloody chin and bloody knuckles, an angry, gawky, protective teenage boy whose noodly arms were barely even good for throwing softballs in PE, and the ghost of a thoroughly-thrashed bully between them. Mabel didn’t mention that she had specifically called out Lucas Peters, and she didn’t mention that the troll in question gave Dipper trouble every other week, and she _certainly_ didn’t mention the hot anger that boiled in her when she saw his Confederate flag notebook (incongruous to their area; he couldn’t even pretend to claim ignorance, it was just a blatant calling card for yet another alt-right supremacist jerk). All of that was irrelevant, and none of it would help her case. She just smiled and smiled, and waited for Dr. Wood to answer the trap question.

Would he have preferred she waited until it was too late to defend herself? Was he the kind of Principal who said “boys will be boys” and encouraged, or at least didn’t _discourage,_ physical violence against nonaggressive or effeminate boys? She had told a bystander to go get a teacher immediately, knowing that it would provoke Lucas into a fight, when they were too far away for a teacher to come before she got in a punch or twelve. She wasn’t one for the long con (not that she was, in general, one for “the con” at all, but she knew when Grunkle Stan’s life philosophies would come in handy), but she was quick on her feet when she needed to be.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve gotten into a fistfight with a boy, Mabel,” Dr. Wood said slowly, measuring his words. He wasn’t wrong. Heck, the last time she’d spent the summer in Gravity Falls with Grenda’s family, she’d split the lip of some tourist making fun of Candy. Considering the somewhat hellish custody arrangement Candy’s parents had, alternating years in Gurim and Gravity Falls, Mabel and Grenda had decided to choose a year when Candy would be there with them, and Mabel had just...gotten mad, for Candy’s sake and (selfishly) for having to see another person she cared about get hurt. He’d been doing that _thing,_ talking slowly and loudly like he thought Candy could not understand and somehow that would be _better._

(Grenda’d had to pull Mabel off him. Grunkle Stan, in town for a few weeks with Grunkle Ford to check in on the state of things, had given her 20 bucks and a lollipop.)

She ramped up her smile just a tad. “I totally understand where you’re coming from. It looks a little etch-a-sketch, I know. It’s just that most girls my age are afraid to fight back, because of stuff like this right here — if even _teachers_ don’t take us seriously, will the rest of the world? The news says no. And boys see that, and they get mean. I fight back, and you’re right, sometimes it’s with my fists. I’m willing to be punished for that, if it means letting people know I’m not easy to hurt.”

It felt sticky and gross in her mouth, like victim-blaming, like throwing other girls under the bus. But it was also true, in the sense that most girls _were_ afraid to fight back. For all those reasons and more. The truth was, Mabel enjoyed a fair bit of what internet people called privilege: her parents weren’t well-off but they didn’t live in poverty either, her skin was pale, she wasn’t binary trans or nonbinary, and even her differences were sort of naturally hidden. Her whole family on both sides was Jewish in theory, Grandpa Sherman even had a mezuzah on his doorpost and everything, but in practice, she’d been raised entirely secular, and her unexpected talent for gematria had come about in response to Dipper’s investment in numerology rather than her own heritage (which was to say, nobody could tell on first blush what her grandparents believed in, who-where-what she had come from, so if she were so inclined, she could pretend for the sake of convenience and safety that she wasn’t in the target demographic of trolls like Lucas; she was not so inclined, but she _could_ _)._ She might have been pan, but she’d only ever dated one person for more than a week in Piedmont — a boy — so she appeared to be entirely heterosexual. She wasn’t the daintiest girl in her year, but she wasn’t big and overtly muscular either, so she came across as a scrappy underdog in all the fights she got into. And of course, she had Dipper.

Dipper, her beloved twin, who loved pop music and hated fighting. Dipper, who was terrible with girls. Dipper, who was more interested in books than people, who got called homophobic insults just for walking the wrong way, who coded everything so well that everyone thought he had a couple of screws loose. What twin sister _wouldn’t_ want to protect her vulnerable brother, even at the expense of her own safety?

If she got into trouble, it was likely that she’d get into less trouble by virtue of the way people saw her. She and Dipper had talked about this before, the first time she’d noticed it. Even now, she didn’t really understand it, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t grasp the overall function. Dr. Wood’s first instinct, to punish her, might very well be lessened by all these factors, and Lucas, that walking trashbag, would enjoy the punishment he should have gotten a long time ago, in the form of two black eyes from his broken nose and a twisted wrist from the way she’d yanked hers out of his grip. 

It didn’t take more than a second or two for all of this to flash through her mind. She wasn’t a very calculating person, but _when one door closes_ and all that. Sometimes brute force was the only way to solve a problem, and she’d understood her position on things for over two years now.

Dr. Wood sighed and turned to Dipper, whose demeanor tended to vacillate between “nervous wreck” and “excited nerd,” and caught him chewing on the end of a pen. It was an annoying bad habit, but it probably made him look even more anxious than he was. “I know you weren’t involved in this, Mason, but you’re our only eyewitness, and you’re not exactly a reliable source, given your relationship to Mabel. Still, you’ve proven to be trustworthy in the past.” That wasn’t totally accurate. It was more that Dipper was comically bad at lying, so he didn’t try unless it was really important. “What’s your assessment of the situation?”

“It...it all happened so fast,” Dipper replied, sounding unsure of himself. Lie #1. “One minute Lucas was making fun of me and the next, he grabbed Mabel. I don’t know if I saw a knife or just something shiny.” Lie #2. There had never been a knife, although Lucas did brag about carrying one. “She was just trying to get him to stop teasing me. She told him to stop and he grabbed her, and she told Michelle to run for help. She asked him to let go.” Lie #3. As soon as Michelle had left the area, Mabel had made fun of Lucas’ grip, telling him her three-year-old cousin had a better one. “You know that white noise that gets in your ears when you’re really scared? That happened to me — I thought he was going to kill her. I know it’s not really okay to fight on school grounds, but I’m glad she knocked him out. I don’t know what he would have done, and it’s not like I’m much help.” Lie #4. Dipper knew some esoteric spells that could put someone in a lifelong coma. That wouldn’t exactly help them, though. “If you punish Mabel for fighting, you should punish me, too, for — for being useless.”

Dipper could be devious when he wanted to be. He was probably annoyed at being called Mason.

The dominoes were lined up _just right,_ and Mabel, feeling the shift in the air — tasting it, knowing it on a molecular level — flicked at the chain. Turning up the puppy-dog eyes to eleven, she said plaintively, “Dipper didn’t do anything wrong, Dr. Wood. I wanted to keep myself safe, and Dipper was just there. He never does anything to fight back against the bullying. Please don’t punish him for my fears.”

_Fear._

_Safe._

_Bullying._

“You’re on thin ice, Mabel,” Dr. Wood warned, “but I understand. Next time, I’ll have no choice but to suspend you, and I’ve already had Mrs. Tailor call your parents.”

“I won’t let you down,” she promised enthusiastically. Last lie of the meeting. She wasn’t going to stop standing up for herself and others, even if it meant getting kicked out entirely. She could get her GED at any time; she was only in school for the social aspect, anyway.

* * *

“Sometimes, you remind me of Grunkle Stan,” Dipper told her later that night in a way that sounded kind of disapproving. Technically, they were banished to their rooms, but they had an adjoined bathroom, so it wasn’t like they couldn’t chill out on Mabel’s fluffy pillows and talk like they had in the old days. Where Dipper’s bed had once been, Mabel now had a study desk with a bright pink laptop atop it, closed and shoved to the side in favor of a sewing machine and some bright blue fabric she was using to make a new ruched circle skirt. Somewhere around their 14th birthday, their parents had separated them, but it wasn’t an enforced separation — they were too close for that. The official story was that Mabel had been kidnapped and Dipper had been roughed up trying to save her on his own, because their Great-Uncle Stanford (and newly-returned Great-Uncle Stanley) had been detained by the police as suspects for three days and Dipper had run off in an angry panic to save her; shared trauma was something their parents understood, and if their coping skills meant sticking together at the expense of other friendships, at least they told each _other_ about their nightmares. 

(Nobody wanted to tell normal people about a literal demon trying and failing to take over the world. That was just too unbelievable. Michael, a software developer, and Rachel, a copywriter, didn’t generally go in for the fantastic.)

Mabel was upside-down with her feet planted against the wall, hair hanging down to the floor, while she munched on liquorice — the good kind, not the movie-theater kind that tasted like fake strawberry boogers. At Dipper’s strangely solemn accusation, she rolled over her shoulders to land on her feet and immediately regretted it. The headrush almost made her collapse, but this didn’t seem like an upside-down kind of conversation. She sat down on her bed, properly this time, and asked, “Is that such a bad thing?”

“Maybe? I don’t know.” He eyed her from his lazy sprawl on her window seat. At one time, it had been their toybox. Now, it was warded to the ends of the earth against notice and held their spellbooks and Dipper’s personal journals detailing the supernatural things they’d found in their hometown of Piedmont, California. He was tall enough that it was almost too small to be comfortable, but she had enough pillows that he could turn it into a fluffy chair instead of a bench. “Maybe I’m just jealous. You could get away with murder.”

“That’s the Mabel difference,” she told him with a deliberately sleazy grin, pointing her index fingers at him and winking — a throwback to more carefree days, when they’d both been able to sleep through the night and bullies had just been an obstacle to overcome. She had a sense of humor; she could laugh at herself. And he wasn’t totally wrong. Grunkle Stan’s brand of sleaze was useful sometimes, and she didn’t shy away from it.

Dipper did not smile like she hoped he would. Instead, he froze, eyes wide and bottom lip sucked in between his teeth, looking at her like she was something...something. To be feared? Something that might harm him? He got this look at night sometimes, when he awoke from dreams about Weirdmageddon, when in his dreams he was helpless and hopeless and he couldn’t find her.

She pulled her hands inward, smooshing them together and placing them in her lap. She looked down at them and then back up at her brother, who relaxed slightly, and she asked him carefully, “Where did you just go?”

Their therapist called it a trigger. Therapy wasn’t entirely helpful, because they couldn’t tell their therapist what had _actually_ happened, but she’d taught them enough that they could use her lessons on the truth. Dipper had always been the more anxious twin, and he had a lot more triggers than she did, and they were unpredictable. Mabel had found that she was _angry,_ and had to consciously force herself to do nice things when she was angry, but Dipper had turned inward. He disappeared, leaving his own body behind, where Mabel inhabited both her body and the space around her. There was a part of Mabel that felt like if she fought the whole universe and won, she’d be free of her fear. Dipper didn’t have that.

“I didn’t…”

“It’s okay,” she promised, “you can tell me.”

He put his face in his hands, shook his head, and sighed heavily. “It’s stupid. Just — you were pointing like that, and the _voice,_ and you — I — you were winking, you only had one eye open — really, it’s stupid, Mabel, and I’m sure that I didn’t feel...I thought I felt you do something to reality, the way — it felt like what _he_ did, back when we were twelve. I know I was wrong. I know it’s dumb. It’s just been a weird day.”

The room, suddenly, felt very cold, and Mabel wondered for the first time if those shifts she could taste in the air were as imaginary as she’d assumed.

They’d never talked about Mabeland. It was one of the hard lines she’d drawn, not because she didn’t trust Dipper, but because she just _couldn’t_ talk about it. She opened her mouth and chewed air and choked on her words to the point of gasping, but she physically could not force herself to speak. Instead of trying and failing and trying and failing over and over and over again, she had just stopped, made it a boundary, built a wall around it. Who cared about Mabeland, anyway? None of it had been real. She’d had everything and then it had been violently snatched away, but that had been _her_ decision, and she’d had ultimate power over her own tiny universe that had turned on her in an instant but it had just been a lie, and if sometimes one of her little Stan-inspired plans felt like clapping her hands in her bubble, well, that was coincidence. She didn’t...she didn’t have that kind of power, not anymore. She’d _never_ had that kind of power. Illusions weren’t real.

The absolute, guilty truth was that there were parts of her bubble she missed. She’d had the opportunity to remake the world exactly as she wanted it, and it had been beautiful. Everything had been candy-coated and fun and maybe a little bizarre, but only because Mabel’s preteen fantasies and dreams were candy-coated and fun and bizarre _relative to reality._

And yeah, all right, she had remade some people to keep her company. Only the people who had made her feel unwanted or small had been _changed,_ though. In the case of Candy and Grenda, she hadn’t been able to manifest them there at all, because they were already perfect. Dipper’s weird anger at and fear of girls, and his reluctance to acknowledge Mabel’s own intelligence, had been absent in his replacement; Wendy’s friends had been nicer about their pranks and to each other (especially poor Thompson); even Wendy’s replacement herself, who had wandered off to find Dipper before dissolving at his rejection of her realness, had been less prone to putting down girls who embraced their feminine sides, and had given into that preteen notion that romantic love transcended everything. Mabel hadn’t made another Soos or Grunkle Stan, and she hadn’t gotten around to making another Grunkle Ford — for various reasons, mostly involving her inability to understand adults very well — but she’d been in the process of creating parents who weren’t fighting so much they’d sent their kids away on a bus (to spend the summer with a relative they’d never met) just to figure out whether or not they needed to get divorced.

She couldn’t talk about Mabeland because it hurt, and because it scared her enough to give her nightmares, and because she missed it. She _had_ chosen reality, but reality _hurt,_ even when she did have the power to do something about it, like she had done today with Lucas.

The absolute, guilty truth was that when she tasted those shifts in the air, she took advantage. It _always_ worked out, like she was bending reality to fit what she thought Should Be. She should have gotten in trouble for starting that fight, regardless of whether she’d been right to do so. Mabel had this sort of vague, not-quite-formed idea that bad rules deserved to be broken, but she understood that it meant dealing with consequences. Somehow, she never _saw_ those consequences. She wasn’t untouchable, she’d gotten _in trouble_ before, but when it really counted, she felt something fall into place, saw the sprawl of dominoes, and knocked them over whether she’d been the one to set them up or not. She’d always attributed it to the part of her that maybe, just a little, still idolized her Grunkle Stan. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she had carried another piece of the bubble out with her. Maybe she _was_ bending reality to fit what she thought Should Be.

That was a little bit terrifying. Dipper was terrified of being possessed again, but Mabel didn’t _need_ to be possessed to dream up a world she considered fun and everyone else considered a horrible nightmare.

Maybe it was time to try again. If this was real, Dipper needed to know.

“You’re not...necessarily wrong,” she hedged, fiddling with her hands and wishing she had some knitting within reach, “to think that. Not — not that I’m possessed or anything. He’s gone. We both know that. Grunkle Stan punched him out of existence like a bad-ace and there’s nothing left but a statue that the kids in town vandalize all the time. I thought it was, you know, fake. That...the thing you felt, the bend in reality. I just figured it was like Grunkle Stan always said about the thrill of a con gone right, the way you can learn to read a room or a person or even a location and get what you want. I didn’t want to think about — I didn’t want to _admit_ that it felt the same as when I was in Ma— the bu— the prison.” She took a deep breath, surprised she had been able to force out the word _prison._ She couldn’t look directly at Dipper. What would she see on his face? Anger? More fear? Disappointment? Hurt? For clarity, she added, “And it’s not stupid, Dipper. Even if you were wrong, it’s not stupid to feel things. I believe that more than anything: you have to trust your heart, because your head will tell you that your heart is wrong, and then you’ll end up sending me a weird note, asking me to help you shut down a portal to another dimension that you built behind my back.”

That got a startled laugh out of her brother, who replied, “Low blow, Mabel.”

She looked up. His face was chalky, anxious, but he didn’t seem to be on the verge of running. Something in her uncurled at the sight. She had genuinely worried that he wouldn’t listen, or that he’d be afraid of her. What she really wanted was for Dipper to talk to her, to tell her what was going through his head, but he _always_ took forever to get there. What she really wanted was for Dipper to tell her she was wrong, that she was being silly, that she hadn’t brought anything out of her prison bubble at all, and then poke fun at her imagination running wild again. “It’s silly, though, right? That can’t be the truth. I’m not infected with Bi— with anything he gave me.”

“Oh. _Oh.”_ Dipper shifted and tugged on his hair, which was a little longer now than he tended to keep it. “That’s probably not how it works. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but if you _did_ absorb some ambient magic, which we wouldn’t know until we ran some tests — I have a ritual written down somewhere, it’s easy, we wouldn’t even need any weird ingredients, just a couple of candles and an incantation, and _anyway,_ if you absorbed ambient magic from your...from the prison, then it’s yours, not his.” His eyes lit up in that way Mabel found both endearing and infuriating. “See, there are two kinds of useable magic-”

“Dipper-”

“-herent and ambient. Inherent magic can only be used _by you,_ because it’s literally part of your soul, while ambient magic can be used by _anyone_ because-”

“Dipper, you’re doing the thing-”

“-not specific. Point being, if you’re subconsciously using _passive_ magic, then it’s inherent rather than ambient, which means it’s yours, no matter where it came from, and-”

“DIPPER. If you were _any more of a nerd_ we’d have to put you in an unfunny 80’s underdog romcom,” she said irritably, rolling her eyes so hard it made her dizzy. She threw herself backward onto her pillows for effect. “I thought you were in a bad place, or at least mad at me.”

She heard him move and felt it when he sat down next to her, but she didn’t look at him. She felt...weirdly vulnerable, and angry again, and she didn’t want to be angry at her brother. The only thing he’d done was be himself. He sighed again and said softly, “I’m not mad at you, Mabel. You didn’t know that would push me over. _I_ didn’t know that would push me over. And I’m really okay. If anything, I’m mad at…” He took a deep breath and his voice got even softer. “...Bill. I’m mad at Bill. For doing this to you. To both of us. To everyone.”

It was so quiet Mabel could hear the light hum of the big desktop rig in Dipper’s room. It was the first time in four years that either of them had said the demon’s name, and Mabel had always considered herself the brave one, but Dipper had done it first. It felt like permission.

She grinned. “That’s such a dumb name. Bill Cipher. Like, _oh, look at me, I’m the Lord of Nightmares, I’ll destroy your world, I’m the god of destruction and chaos,_ but then he’s like...a cartoon, practically. Don’t get me wrong, that totally added to the horror, because it felt like a teenager throwing an underground rave for his lame-o friends but the warehouse they were trashing was Earth and the creepy decorations were _actual people_ and he was gonna murder us. Murdered by a cartoon character with infinite power, what a crap way to go out.”

Dipper snorted in amusement and lay back beside her. She felt like they were twelve again, snickering over the smallest secrets of the small pocket of the universe they inhabited. “I don’t think that was his real name. Names have power, according to...basically all the demonology texts. And I doubt he was going around introducing himself as Bill Cipher to whoever sealed him into the Nightmare Realm thousands of years ago. But you’re right. We’ve been...pfft, you’re _exactly_ right. Scared of a stupid cartoon triangle throwing a rave for his lame-o friends. Maybe he did try to destroy the universe, but he _failed._ Because of us, you and me and our great-uncles.”

“He was about to kill me,” she confessed into the air, also for the first time. They’d always talked around it, alluding to it enough that their therapist understood the gist of things, but she had never actually said that aloud either. “He decided to kill _me._ But he liked me. Maybe that’s why.”

“He _liked_ you? When did he say that?”

She shrugged, which was a little awkward lying down. “In a dream after we blew up my puppet show. I didn’t want to say anything, after what he did to you, because what you went through was so much worse. It was just this weird dream where all my puppets came to life, which wasn’t super surprising since I was already dreaming about it, but then he was there. He looked like a sock, but he also didn’t? I can’t explain it. He told me that I…” She swallowed. “That I had made the wrong choice. That he liked my style, and we had a lot in common, but I could stand to be a little meaner. So when I woke up I promised myself I would be _nicer._ Having something in common with a guy like that…”

“Everyone has something in common with a guy like that,” Dipper dismissed with a wave of his hand that Mabel could see even from flat on the bed. “Great-Uncle Ford told me Bill came to him as a fellow academic. A _Muse._ And he called him Sixer and Fordsy like Grunkle Stan calls him. When he offered me a deal, he made me think the thing with Gideon was just business, but he genuinely wanted to help me crack a code. I think he did it on purpose. It was just a con. That’s what demons do, after all. Nobody makes a deal with someone they don’t trust on some level.”

“But he was right, wasn’t he? We wanted all the same things. I.” She inhaled. She could _do this._ “I wanted my own world where everything was mine. M-Mabeland obeyed me. It was fun and chaotic and perfect. Maybe that’s why I, I soaked up power or whatever, because I _wanted_ it — I wanted my own universe! I loved it. And I didn’t choose reality because I thought the real world was better. I’ve _always_ known reality hurts.” The final secret fell into the space between them, shiny and raw. “I chose reality because I didn’t want you to leave me behind again.”

He rolled over to prop himself up on one elbow. Like this, she could see him if she turned her head. His expression was a little more self-assured than she, personally, was feeling. “I was kind of a jerk back then. That’s not really a secret. I thought you were the selfish one for not going along with everything I wanted, but I was mean to your friends and I thought girls were dumb and you went along with my adventures a lot more than I ever went along with yours. The last thing we’d talked about was me staying in Gravity Falls with Great-Uncle Ford, who, let’s be clear, was still planning to kick Grunkle Stan out of his own home — Stan paid off the mortgage and lived in it 20 years longer than Ford did. Stan had more right to it, but I thought Ford was right because he treated me like an intellectual instead of just a nerdy loser. Just because I rescued you doesn’t mean you were wrong to worry. We both made mistakes. We were _twelve._ What were we supposed to do? If our own parents couldn’t put aside their differences long enough to meet our weird Great-Uncle in person, it’s a miracle we managed to do anything right at all.”

“You’re right,” she said, the coil of tension lessening further the more he talked. “You usually are.”

“Only about as much as you. Mabel, whatever happened back then, it doesn’t have to mean anything if we don’t want it to. I think this is what Dr. Chavez was trying to say last year — well, she doesn’t know about the whole ambient-inherent magic thing, which for the record we are _totally_ going to explore, but when she was talking about how what Bill did to us doesn’t have to define us? I thought that was dumb, but maybe it wasn’t.”

“Maybe we let him in too much,” she agreed. The press of despair couldn’t invade their space, but it tried, so she talked over it. “I’ve been _so angry._ Four years, I’ve been trying not to let it out, but I’m not just angry at Bill, I’m angry at the whole world. I’m angry at bullies and neo-nazis and homophobes and transphobes and, and racists and all the other -ists and all the little ways the world says they’re _okay._ Like when we’re watching a show and there’s a bad stereotype and does that ruin the whole thing? It should, and I’m angry at myself when it doesn’t. I’m angry when people hurt you or Candy or Grenda and I’m angry I can’t just clap my hands and make it better. I have to...it takes _work._ I can’t punch the whole world, either. Mabeland made me feel helpless — not when I was there, but when I finally _wasn’t —_ and I hate it, and I can’t stop being mad. And I’m sorry, Dipper. I don’t want to be a trigger for you. I want to listen to you and...I don’t know. I feel like I’m being selfish, but all of a sudden I can finally talk about this. I just. Wanted to get it out before it stopped again.”

He dropped back onto her bed again. She suppressed a smile. He was so _lanky_ he hardly took up any room at all. He could probably pull off those ridiculous skinny jeans now, but that wasn’t his style, thank everything cute and fluffy. His voice wound into the air above them as he said, “Maybe it’s good that you have some things in common with Grunkle Stan after all. He was smarter than anybody gave him credit for, and he _did_ save the world. But he’s also a mess, so just...keep being you, Mabel. It’s not bad to be angry about that stuff, it’s _normal._ I wish I could be angrier, but I have that voice in the back of my head telling me feelings aren’t rational and...the world will end or my family will die or something terrible will happen if I act on feelings instead of overthinking everything, which paralyzes me anyway. At least you take action.”

“And you protect me from myself when I go too far,” she reminded him. Now that things were in the open, they didn’t feel nearly as big as they had before. “If this is real, and not just us making a big fuss out of nothing, and I do have some kind of...I don’t know, Shooting Star powers-” Dipper snorted again. Mabel graciously ignored it. “-then you can teach me all about it, and I don’t have to be scared. And even if I _don’t,_ I’m never gonna stop protecting _you._ Jerks like Lucas Peters won’t get away with messing with you.”

“I _can_ take care of myself,” he grumbled.

“Yeah,” she said fondly, “but you shouldn’t have to. I love you, Bro-Bro. I’ll always have your back.”

They probably wouldn’t get into the same college. Dipper was aiming for MIT, and Mabel had her heart set on Miskatonic. They didn’t have very much time together before they _had_ to go their separate ways. They couldn’t rely on each other forever. Still, she meant what she’d said: she’d always have his back.

And maybe having a little magic wouldn’t be such a bad thing. She had once commanded her own universe, but she had used it to — in her uncomplicated, prepubescent mind — try to make things better, to make her visitors happy. It might do her some good to stop bending reality to get her out of trouble, and to do good works instead.

**Author's Note:**

> Does Mabel _actually_ have magic powers, or is she just really perceptive? That's not the point of this and the answer is unimportant. The point is that sometimes trauma takes unexpected shapes and therapy doesn't always do the job it's supposed to do, especially when (for whatever reason) you can't be honest with the therapist in question.


End file.
